Flying overseas: Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Flying overseas with small children is not an undertaking to be taken lightly, nor with especially high expectations. The best you can hope for is not to become the center of attention as your toddler screams his way across the stratosphere. But one has to be realistic: it’s impossible to entirely avoid an international meltdown of any kind when you’re spending 18 hours on planes and layovers across ten time zones. You can also hope and pray that you don’t lose track of a child, a spouse or a suitcase while boarding and disembarking multiple airliners and traversing various major airports.

Having said that, I think we can call our travel from Grover Beach, CA to Gotha, Germany an unqualified success. It’s no exaggeration to say that we had been preparing for this trip for many years, but the final hours before departure had us quivering with last minute angst. We’d hoped to get the children in bed at a reasonable hour, but the thrill of anticipation rendered that option unworkable. As it happened, we were actually able to get more sleep for ourselves than I’d expected under the circumstances, but that still wasn’t much.

Waking up at the crack of dawn, with our stomachs tied in knots and our nerves half unraveled, we managed to pack our bags and vacate our hotel suite with teutonic efficiency. After shedding nearly all our possessions and living for the last two months out of our suitcases and among a small collection of cardboard boxes, we had finally reached the end of the line. But by Monday morning, we still had more than we could fit in our luggage, so we left our hotel littered with excessive articles of worn out clothing, half empty tubs of sauerkraut and feta cheese, and a random assortment of busy bags for the kids—just enough to leave the housecleaning staff wondering whether we’d really left the hotel or not.

From there we headed straight to the SLO City Airport, arriving punctually, much too early for our flight, as the airline staff had encouraged us to do. So we waited in the terminal for an hour and a half, as we would likewise do in LAX and Seattle before boarding our final leg to Frankfurt. In LAX we almost lost Max’s carseat, one of the more more cumbersome items in our cargo. We were lucky and alert enough at that point to go back and recover this vital accessory from the baggage claim carousel.

Such good fortune and presence of mind were absent later in our itinerary when we somehow lost track of Millie’s booster seat. This was, however, the only serious snafu we encountered in our long journey that began in a Pismo Beach hotel Monday morning at 8:30 and ended in the Frankfurt international airport at 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. The flights were uneventful, the layovers were manageable, and the service and refreshments on little-known Condor Airlines turned out to be surprisingly pleasant, including a complimentary cognac after a rather tasty plate of pasta marinara.

It was there, in Frankfurt, that Max finally and utterly collapsed. In this meltdown of a lifetime, he went limp and fell to the floor like a soap opera heroine, proceeding to kick and scream and flail his body like a steelhead on a sidewalk, attracting all forms of attention, from glares of disapproval to looks of sympathy and even a generous offer from an off-duty flight attendant to help by doing who-knows-what. This demonstration went on for the better part of our drawn out search for the rental car counter.

But that was as bad as it got, and as long as it never gets that bad again, we should be just fine. In the end, our family survived the day of transit with commendable strength and stamina. Our arrival, in fact, was filled with auspicious signs, which I will gladly enumerate once I get some decent sleep and a chance to recover from this nasty case of jet lag.

Read more about the departure process:

• Getting On and Letting Go
• Going places with emotional luggage
• 12 Steps to let go and discover the world

Or skip ahead to some of the highlights:

• WWOOFing with Children
• Q & A Post Work Away
• New Education for Global Citizens